How a Plot Convulsed Iran in '53 (and in '79)

By JAMES RISEN

or nearly five decades, America's role in the military coup that
ousted Iran's elected prime minister and returned the shah to power
has been lost to history, the subject
of fierce debate in Iran and stony
silence in the United States. One by
one, participants have retired or
died without revealing key details,
and the Central Intelligence Agency said a number of records of the
operation  its first successful
overthrow of a foreign government
 had been destroyed.

But a copy of the agency's secret
history of the coup has surfaced,
revealing the inner workings of a
plot that set the stage for the Islamic revolution in 1979, and for a
generation of anti-American hatred in one of the Middle East's
most powerful countries.

The document, which remains
classified, discloses the pivotal
role British intelligence officials
played in initiating and planning
the coup, and it shows that Washington and London shared an interest in maintaining the West's control over Iranian oil.

The secret history, written by
the C.I.A.'s chief coup planner and
obtained by The New York Times,
says the operation's success was
mostly a matter of chance. The
document shows that the agency
had almost complete contempt for
the man it was empowering, Shah
Mohammed Reza Pahlevi, whom
it derided as a vacillating coward.
And it recounts, for the first time,
the agency's tortured efforts to
seduce and cajole the shah into
taking part in his own coup.

The operation, code-named TP-Ajax, was the blueprint for a succession of C.I.A. plots to foment
coups and destabilize governments during the cold war  including the agency's successful
coup in Guatemala in 1954 and the
disastrous Cuban intervention
known as the Bay of Pigs in 1961.
In more than one instance, such
operations led to the same kind of
long-term animosity toward the
United States that occurred in
Iran.

The history says agency officers
orchestrating the Iran coup
worked directly with royalist Iranian military officers, handpicked
the prime minister's replacement,
sent a stream of envoys to bolster
the shah's courage, directed a
campaign of bombings by Iranians
posing as members of the Communist Party, and planted articles
and editorial cartoons in newspapers.

But on the night set for Prime
Minister Mohammed Mossadegh's
overthrow, almost nothing went
according to the meticulously
drawn plans, the secret history
says. In fact, C.I.A. officials were
poised to flee the country when
several Iranian officers recruited
by the agency, acting on their own, took
command of a pro-shah demonstration in
Tehran and seized the government.

Two days after the coup, the history discloses, agency officials funneled $5 million
to Iran to help the government they had
installed consolidate power.

The outlines of the American role in the
coup were disclosed in Iran at the outset and
later in the memoirs of C.I.A. officers and
other published accounts. But many specifics have remained classified, and the secret
history obtained by The New York Times is
the first detailed government account of the
coup to be made public.

The C.I.A. has been slow to make available the Iran files. Two directors of central
intelligence, Robert Gates and R. James
Woolsey, vowed to declassify records of the
agency's early covert actions, including the
coup. But the agency said three years ago
that a number of relevant documents had
been destroyed in the early 1960's.

A C.I.A. spokesman said Friday that the
agency had retained about 1,000 pages of
documents related to the coup, besides the
history and an internal account written later. He said the papers destroyed in the early
1960's were duplicates and working files.

The chief State Department historian said
that his office received a copy of the history
seven years ago but that no decision on
declassifying it had yet been made.

The secret history, along with operational
assessments written by coup planners, was
provided to The Times by a former official
who kept a copy.

Photograph from "Adventures in the Middle East" by Donald N. Wilber, Darwin.

Donald Wilber

It was written in March 1954 by Dr. Donald N. Wilber, an expert in Persian architecture, who as one of the leading planners
believed that covert operatives had much to
learn from history.

In less expansive memoirs published in
1986, Dr. Wilber asserted that the Iran coup
was different from later C.I.A. efforts. Its
American planners, he said, had stirred up
considerable unrest in Iran, giving Iranians
a clear choice between instability and supporting the shah. The move to oust the
prime minister, he wrote, thus gained substantial popular support.

Dr. Wilber's memoirs were heavily censored by the agency, but he was allowed to
refer to the existence of his secret history.
"If this history had been read by the planners of the Bay of Pigs," he wrote, "there
would have been no such operation."

"From time to time," he continued, "I
gave talks on the operation to various
groups within the agency, and, in hindsight,
one might wonder why no one from the
Cuban desk ever came or read the history."

The coup was a turning point in modern
Iranian history and remains a persistent
irritant in Tehran-Washington relations. It
consolidated the power of the shah, who
ruled with an iron hand for 26 more years in
close contact with to the United States. He
was toppled by militants in 1979. Later that
year, marchers went to the American Embassy, took diplomats hostage and declared
that they had unmasked a "nest of spies"
who had been manipulating Iran for decades.

The Islamic government of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini supported terrorist attacks
against American interests largely because
of the long American history of supporting
the shah. Even under more moderate rulers,
many Iranians still resent the United States'
role in the coup and its support of the shah.

Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright,
in an address in March, acknowledged the
coup's pivotal role in the troubled relationship and came closer to apologizing than
any American official ever has before.

"The Eisenhower administration believed its actions were justified for strategic
reasons," she said. "But the coup was clearly a setback for Iran's political development. And it is easy to see now why many
Iranians continue to resent this intervention
by America in their internal affairs."

The history spells out the calculations to
which Dr. Albright referred in her speech.

Britain, it says, initiated the plot in 1952.
The Truman administration rejected it, but
President Eisenhower approved it shortly
after taking office in 1953, because of fears
about oil and Communism.

The document pulls few punches, acknowledging at one point that the agency
baldly lied to its British allies. Dr. Wilber
reserves his most withering asides for the
agency's local allies, referring to "the recognized incapacity of Iranians to plan or act
in a thoroughly logical manner."